Constructing the International Economy Edited by Rawi Abdelal, Mark Blyth and Craig Parsons From the Preface …We began the project with a simple agenda: to promote intellectual engagement among scholars of political economy. The potential gains from such trade were, and remain, promising. Yet scholars working with theories informed by social constructivism regularly ignored the rationalist and, generally, materialist mainstream of international political economy. The sop-called mainstream, as a collective, did not so much dismiss the usefulness of constructivism as fail to notice it. Scholars were not talking past each other; they were not even talking. That unhappy state of affairs already has changed significantly during the past several years. We believe that more remains to be done, and that our mutual learning will reap great rewards. To that end, we offer this book, which we hope will be seen as an invitation to join a conversation that is ever more fascinating. Rawi Abdelal is Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is author of National Purpose in the World Economy, also from Cornell, and Capital Rules. Mark Blyth is Professor of International Political Economy at Brown University and author most recently of The Handbook of International Political Economy( IPE) . Craig Parsons is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon and author of books including A Certain Idea of Europe, also from Cornell, and How to Map Arguments in Political Science.